It was a common thing for European travelers and diplomats to use Jews as interpreters, as they had a knowledge of Hebrew that allowed them to discuss with other Jews all around the known world, no matter the national boundaries. Christopher Columbus did the same and brought the interpreter Luis De Torres (Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri) with him, but you can guess that Hebrew wasn't very useful in this new Caribbean linguistic landscape.

I am not an expert of the Spanish area of colonization, but I know that the French always had translators with them, although their skills were sometimes limited. We know, for example, that Jacques Cartier (1534) had interpreters with him - who probably had a knowledge of the basco-iroquois or basco-algonquian pidgins. A pidgin is a grammatically simplified mix of two languages or more often used for commercial exchange. In that case it was developed by the Basque whalers and fishermen who established temporary outposts in the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence river at the beginning of the XVIth Century. Although he had access to this pool of knowledge, Cartier's interpreters were not always very good at understanding the locals, especially when they went farther inland, as we infer from the multiple mistakes we find in the travel account.

The first Champlain expedition (1604-1606) came with Mathieu Da Costa, an African free man who was also a polyglot and who could talk the basco-alonquian pidgin and at least one native language (along with several European languages). The French called these translators "Truchements", a word we could loosely translate to "Mediators". Champlain also gave custody of the young Étienne Brûlé to the Hurons in 1611. Brûlé, who was 19 years old at the time, spent several years with the Hurons, learning about their language and culture, becoming an important link between the French and their Allies before his assassination in 1633.

.Another famous "truchement" was Pierre-Esprit Radisson who was kidnapped as a teenager near the Trois-Rivières settlement by the Iroquois around 1651. Radisson spent several years as the adoptive son of an Mohawk family, learning their language and working as an interpreter after his escape, first for the French, and after that for the British. The French were pretty good at using these "truchements" and Lewis and Clark used the skills of someone like Georges Drouillard during their expedition to the West.